Anglers practice many techniques to attract fish to the hook. Lures carrying live bait, lures assembled of entirely artificial components, and lures with both live bait and artificial elements may be used. Blades may also be attached and structured to provide additional movement and/or attractive flashing light. The lures may include devices that impart sound to the surrounding water as the lures pass through the water. Lures may also be configured to travel in nonlinear paths while retrieved through the water.
Anglers also often employ various mechanisms to protect their lures from snagging underwater obstacles while being fished. A snagged lure catches no fish and, if the fishing line breaks, a snagged lure is lost. The known techniques for improving the snag resistance of a fishing lure involve sheltering the barb of the lure hook from catching upon an obstacle. One type of design includes a spring-loaded bail that rests against the hook barb; the bail is intended to collapse away from the barb upon pressure from the mouth of a striking fish. A second type of design uses a leading fairing in close proximity to the hook barb; the fairing is intended to be close enough to the barb either to deflect the obstacle away from the barb or to deflect the lure away from the obstacle, but far enough away from the bard to allow a fish to catch upon the barb. A third type of design simply buries the hook bard in a pliable membrane; the membrane is intended to be sufficiently resilient to prevent the hook barb from passing through the membrane and catching on an interfering obstacle but sufficiently pliable to allow the hook barb to pass through and catch a striking fish. All three designs are regrettably suspected of reducing the number of fish hooked. Ideally, a fishing lure would have a hook that is unobstructed for biting by a fish but is still resistant to snagging by reason of the functionality of the lure, but the known techniques fail that ideal.
Unfortunately, the known devices and configurations for seeking any particular objective with a fishing lure design are of limited effectiveness in accomplishing any other, second objective and, in many respects, may frustrate the accomplishment of a second objective. For example, the known fishing lure blade systems, used to provide an attractive flashing of light from the lure during retrieval, at best serve no complementary purpose in furthering any second particular fishing method, such as, for example, improving the lure's resistance to snagging; instead, to enjoy both the first benefit of a blade and the second benefit of snag resistance, separate blade systems and snag resistance systems must be used and they must be carefully configured so as not to interfere with one another (e.g., a moving blade ought not strike the bail of a snag resistance apparatus) even if such a configuration reduces the effectiveness of either or both systems. The same general problem persists as to other fishing lure techniques. For a second example, the incorporation of a rattle into a fishing lure may impart sound from the lure to the surrounding water, but does nothing to produce the flash of a blade system, nothing to allow for the attachment of live bait (and, in fact, may frustrate the attachment of live bait if the rattle is built into a competing artificial bait component of the lure), and nothing to steer the lure along nonlinear paths through the water; instead, the rattle merely rattles.
In a word, the known devices and configurations for achieving any particular objective with a fishing lure design are, in certain respects, inefficient.